Live from Morehead City, it's Queen Anne's Revenge

Queen Anne’s Revenge
Shipwreck Project
RESEARCH REPORT AND BULLETIN SERIES
QAR-B-02-01
Live from Morehead City,
it’s Queen Anne’s Revenge
Presented at the 2002 Society for Historical Archaeology/
Conference for Underwater Archaeology in Mobile, Alabama
June 2002
Underwater Archaeology Branch
Office of State Archaeology
Department of Cultural Resources
State of North Carolina
www.qaronline.org
QAR-B-02-01 Wilde-Ramsing/Eslinger
Abstract
Since the announcement of its discovery by Governor James B. Hunt on March 3, 1997, the
public response to Queen Anne’s Revenge is nearly overwhelming. The shipwreck has already been the
subject of documentaries filmed by University of North Carolina/Public Broadcasting System (UNC-TV),
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), National Geographic and the Discovery Channel as
well as live feature segments on Cable News Network (CNN), the History Channel and National
Broadcasting Company’s (NBC) Good Morning America. In short, the discovery of Blackbeard’s
flagship has created a unique educational opportunity for public and classroom programming relating
to a broad range of subjects relating to this famous eighteenth century ship. The most innovative
initiative involves a distance education program, based on live streaming Internet transmissions and
entitled QAR DiveLive.
QAR-B-02-01 Wilde-Ramsing/Eslinger
Introduction
Wreck site 31CR314, the alleged Queen Anne’s Revenge (QAR) site, since its discovery in the fall of
1996 has excited the public’s imagination. The ability of staff to disseminate information about the
site has been assisted by their ability to video archive the archaeological expeditions. At the same
time, interest generated by Blackbeard’s flagship made the project the focus of several documentaries
including those seen on UNC-TV, BBC, and National Geographic among others. It has also been
featured on several live segments with CNN, the History Channel and NBC’s Good Morning America.
The lacking thread was the project’s ability to contact students, educators and public directly. The
exhibition of QAR artifacts in the North Carolina Maritime Museum, while notable, did not reach a
large enough audience to fulfill the educational needs of the project.
Early in 2000 Bill Lovin of Marine Graphics and Rick Allen, Nautilus Productions, proposed a
week long educational event based on daily live broadcasts at the QAR site. The partnership
between Lovin, Allen and QAR melded television technology, Internet streaming, and underwater
archaeology. At the time of the proposal, Allen had served as project videographer for the previous
two years, and Lovin not only had produced numerous shows on North Carolina shipwrecks, but
also currently directed the live webcast twice a year for the Rachel Carson site of the North Carolina
National Estuarine Research Reserve in Beaufort, North Carolina.
QAR-B-02-01 Wilde-Ramsing/Eslinger
The challenge was to obtain a signal from twenty-five feet below the Atlantic Ocean’s surface,
send it two and three-quarter miles to the shore station, and then digitize it for relay to the Internet
where school groups and the general public could watch and participate. Allen and Lovin’s proposed
method involved placing a mini-video studio aboard a research vessel anchored over the shipwreck
site. There were multiple technological challenges to overcome for this to work. The first was to
transmit video and audio in real time from the ocean floor to a boat. The second challenge was to
transmit that signal from the boat to the shore station. Third was to receive the microwave signal at
the shore station and digitize it for Internet webcast, and lastly to provide a real time link from the
web, back to the boat and site allowing archaeologists to answer questions. This effectively linked
television technology, archaeology, information technology, and public education. Allen’s crew
would document activities on the bottom while feeding a live video signal to the surface via a cable
and audio via an Ocean Technology System (OTS) communication system. Once on the surface,
QAR-B-02-01 Wilde-Ramsing/Eslinger
audio and video technicians selected different cameras, including underwater or surface feeds, and
sent the signal via microwave to shore for digitization and finally web streaming. The shore studio
was equipped for live digitizing, and television equipment for providing videotaped inserts and
recordings for delayed transmission and archiving.
As with the Estuary Internet event, schools pre-registered for the event and during designated
times could email questions to technicians at the shore station. From there, questions and
information on the student and school were transmitted to a shipboard operator, who transferred the
inquiries to divers through the underwater communication system. These latter audio transmissions
paired with the responses from divers were sent back to the shore station, out on the Internet and
back to the schools.
While in theory the system would work, the distance from the site to the shore station created
uncertainty. Most problematic was the quality of the microwave signal from a rocking boat,
especially when the sea state deteriorated. Funding was secured for the inaugural event, QAR
LiveDive 2000, and conducted in conjunction with archaeological recovery work in October 2000.
QAR LiveDive 2000
The initial goal of LiveDive 2000 was to broadcast live from QAR to the Internet while allowing
students to log on and question archaeologists as they worked on the ocean floor. To make this
QAR-B-02-01 Wilde-Ramsing/Eslinger
work, Bill Lovin and Rick Allen used two microwave transmitters and five antenna arrays. The high-powered
transmitter was placed on the boat and pushed the signal back to our shore facility at Duke
Marine Lab, and to the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort. On the rooftop of one of
Duke’s buildings, five antennas received the transmission and sent the signal down a cable to the
digitization studio where Bill Lovin compressed the signal for the web.
LiveDive 2000 began with little publicity and fanfare, but by the end of the week of webcasts
from the wreck site in October 2000, an estimated 1600 school children from across North America
had tuned in. Forty-nine school groups participated, including schools from North Carolina,
Washington State, New York, and Canada. These students logged on to the website every day to
watch the twice daily live broadcasts and ask the archaeologists questions in real-time as they worked
on the ocean floor. Included in the live question and answer periods was the North Carolina
Maritime Museum in Beaufort, the home of the project, and the North Carolina Museum of History
in Raleigh. In both locations the live segments were broadcast and used for public education over
the course of the five days.
The conclusion of LiveDive2000 demonstrated that the QAR Project had the necessary
components to make a webcast such as this happen technologically. The success was evident when
at the end of the event the large number of users logged onto the two servers caused both streaming
QAR-B-02-01 Wilde-Ramsing/Eslinger
sites to crash rather unexpectedly. This only raised the bar for the following year. In August of 2001
planning began for DiveLive 2001. This time the coordination of Bill Lovin, Rick Allen, and the
QAR Project resulted in better-planned sessions, better technological troubleshooting, richer content
and a far better webcast.
DiveLive 2001
October 1-5, 2001 the Queen Anne’s Revenge Shipwreck Project again went live from the wreck site
to the web. For two and a half days students and the public could log-on to watch and talk to
archaeologists as they worked on the site. For the last two and a half days the project staff took
students into the conservation laboratories to witness conservation and documentation processes.
After running LiveDive 2000, the QAR project staff and DiveLive staff felt they knew how to
improve on the previous year’s webcast. To accomplish this they set specific goals for 2001: first, to
broadcast live from the wreck site; second, to involve an even larger group of children and public
thus taking archaeology into a larger arena; and third, to broadcast from the conservation labs and
demonstrate the importance of slowly and thoroughly documenting every artifact and concretion.
With minimal publicity again this year the event drew an even larger audience, reaching sixteen states,
QAR-B-02-01 Wilde-Ramsing/Eslinger
two countries, eighty-seven schools, two museums, over thirty-six hundred school children and more
than twenty-seven hundred of the general public.
Although cameras and underwater housings have been around for decades, the transfer of a live
audio and video signal from a wreck site to a shore based station to the Internet is still a new
concept. In 2000 the project paired archaeological processes with the LiveDive event only to
discover that the webcasts interfered with the underwater work, as both archaeologists excavating
and archaeologists on camera required the communication units. To accommodate this problem in
2001, an archaeological plan, generated by Field Supervisor Michael Plakos was the foundation for
both broadcast times and the processes that could be shown on camera. In this way the archaeology
continued as the webcasts happened. As a result students watched and listened to the new
gradiometer survey, participated as a new baseline was laid, learned about artifact tagging, and site
examination. This year’s broadcast combined the excitement of underwater archaeology on the QAR
site with the scientific processes in the QAR labs. Students learned about archaeology, history,
chemistry, and geology while being able to ask questions and receive answers in real time. The
questions received during the five-day webcasts from students and teachers clearly demonstrated
both previous participation and the success of both this year and last year’s events.
QAR-B-02-01 Wilde-Ramsing/Eslinger
To handle the expected students for this year’s broadcast it was necessary to change some
aspects of the DiveLive production. This process began with meetings between Rick Allen, Bill
Lovin and DiveLive Coordinator Kim Eslinger. Together they planned out contingency broadcast
schedules, set tasks, determined technological parameters and laid out the event. To accomplish
DiveLive this year several constraints needed solving; the SGI needed to be eliminated, and more
streams were needed on the servers. This year rather than relying on the SGI workstation that
wreaked so much havoc the previous year; work was transferred to Power Mac G4’s even while
streaming to the Real Player server on NC DPI. Apple Computers donated streaming server space
for the project to allow us a continuous stream without concern over crashing servers. It was quite
clear in 2000 that there simply wasn’t enough server space to handle the amount of traffic that even
minimal publicity generated. NC DPI came through again with access to their server, but they could
only handle a small number of streams. In response to requests for greater server space David Kaye
at NC DPI approached Apple Computers to look into hosting the event on their ALI site. While
streaming live audio and video is difficult enough and bandwidth intensive, it was more difficult to
get Apple and DPI’s servers to talk to one another. To send the signal to Apple the signal was
obtained from the wreck site, sent back to the shore station, then sent via either T1 or T3 lines to
NCDPI, Apple Computer’s server then “split” the signal and broke through DPI’s firewall to pull a
stream to their server where it was made available to anyone that wanted to watch. With virtually
unlimited bandwidth at Apple’s server anyone could log on without our worries regarding server
crashes.
Unfortunately while the computer technology mostly worked there were some glitches primarily
associated with email communication between participating school groups and project engineers. A
virus in North Carolina took out most of the school servers resulting in major problems for all of
their Public Schools in accessing our site. Adding to the difficulties was the fact that the address set
up to handle the incoming questions failed and refused to recognize the emails. On the very first day
of the webcasts we received questions from students on the west coast three hours after the
broadcasts had ended, apparently yet another server issue. Several participants also complained
about the delay in the audio signals or that the signal was jumpy on their screens. These issues
appear to have solved themselves in every case, and there is still no answer as to why they happened
as they did.
Participation grew again this year at the end of the week as word circulated. One of the keys to
making an event such as this possible is the inclusion of proper publicity. Without advance public
relations and proper planning the event with either fail technologically or from lack of participation.
Because the point of an event such as this is to reach as large an audience as possible it is important
to notify schools and the public well in advance so that they can be computer savvy enough to
QAR-B-02-01 Wilde-Ramsing/Eslinger
participate. As school budgets across the country are continually cut, this too is a new and exciting
way to introduce school children to a world that they would be unable to see on traditional field trips.
In conclusion, this live Internet event was a resounding success for the QAR Project Staff, the
students and public involved.
While technological problems are expected, they can generally be resolved, and as technicians
continue to gain experience many can be anticipated and avoided. As confidence in the technology
grows and the ability to reach larger audiences becomes possible, organizers will seek to engage a
larger audience. Greater publicity and advanced notice can be accompanied with pre-project lesson
plans and activities, which in turn, will better prepare students for the DiveLive event and enrich that
experience. QAR DiveLive has proven that through technological advances, innovative and
dedicated personnel, and a relatively low budget an exciting, interactive experience in underwater
archaeology can be brought to tens of thousands of students and the interested public.

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Queen Anne’s Revenge
Shipwreck Project
RESEARCH REPORT AND BULLETIN SERIES
QAR-B-02-01
Live from Morehead City,
it’s Queen Anne’s Revenge
Presented at the 2002 Society for Historical Archaeology/
Conference for Underwater Archaeology in Mobile, Alabama
June 2002
Underwater Archaeology Branch
Office of State Archaeology
Department of Cultural Resources
State of North Carolina
www.qaronline.org
QAR-B-02-01 Wilde-Ramsing/Eslinger
Abstract
Since the announcement of its discovery by Governor James B. Hunt on March 3, 1997, the
public response to Queen Anne’s Revenge is nearly overwhelming. The shipwreck has already been the
subject of documentaries filmed by University of North Carolina/Public Broadcasting System (UNC-TV),
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), National Geographic and the Discovery Channel as
well as live feature segments on Cable News Network (CNN), the History Channel and National
Broadcasting Company’s (NBC) Good Morning America. In short, the discovery of Blackbeard’s
flagship has created a unique educational opportunity for public and classroom programming relating
to a broad range of subjects relating to this famous eighteenth century ship. The most innovative
initiative involves a distance education program, based on live streaming Internet transmissions and
entitled QAR DiveLive.
QAR-B-02-01 Wilde-Ramsing/Eslinger
Introduction
Wreck site 31CR314, the alleged Queen Anne’s Revenge (QAR) site, since its discovery in the fall of
1996 has excited the public’s imagination. The ability of staff to disseminate information about the
site has been assisted by their ability to video archive the archaeological expeditions. At the same
time, interest generated by Blackbeard’s flagship made the project the focus of several documentaries
including those seen on UNC-TV, BBC, and National Geographic among others. It has also been
featured on several live segments with CNN, the History Channel and NBC’s Good Morning America.
The lacking thread was the project’s ability to contact students, educators and public directly. The
exhibition of QAR artifacts in the North Carolina Maritime Museum, while notable, did not reach a
large enough audience to fulfill the educational needs of the project.
Early in 2000 Bill Lovin of Marine Graphics and Rick Allen, Nautilus Productions, proposed a
week long educational event based on daily live broadcasts at the QAR site. The partnership
between Lovin, Allen and QAR melded television technology, Internet streaming, and underwater
archaeology. At the time of the proposal, Allen had served as project videographer for the previous
two years, and Lovin not only had produced numerous shows on North Carolina shipwrecks, but
also currently directed the live webcast twice a year for the Rachel Carson site of the North Carolina
National Estuarine Research Reserve in Beaufort, North Carolina.
QAR-B-02-01 Wilde-Ramsing/Eslinger
The challenge was to obtain a signal from twenty-five feet below the Atlantic Ocean’s surface,
send it two and three-quarter miles to the shore station, and then digitize it for relay to the Internet
where school groups and the general public could watch and participate. Allen and Lovin’s proposed
method involved placing a mini-video studio aboard a research vessel anchored over the shipwreck
site. There were multiple technological challenges to overcome for this to work. The first was to
transmit video and audio in real time from the ocean floor to a boat. The second challenge was to
transmit that signal from the boat to the shore station. Third was to receive the microwave signal at
the shore station and digitize it for Internet webcast, and lastly to provide a real time link from the
web, back to the boat and site allowing archaeologists to answer questions. This effectively linked
television technology, archaeology, information technology, and public education. Allen’s crew
would document activities on the bottom while feeding a live video signal to the surface via a cable
and audio via an Ocean Technology System (OTS) communication system. Once on the surface,
QAR-B-02-01 Wilde-Ramsing/Eslinger
audio and video technicians selected different cameras, including underwater or surface feeds, and
sent the signal via microwave to shore for digitization and finally web streaming. The shore studio
was equipped for live digitizing, and television equipment for providing videotaped inserts and
recordings for delayed transmission and archiving.
As with the Estuary Internet event, schools pre-registered for the event and during designated
times could email questions to technicians at the shore station. From there, questions and
information on the student and school were transmitted to a shipboard operator, who transferred the
inquiries to divers through the underwater communication system. These latter audio transmissions
paired with the responses from divers were sent back to the shore station, out on the Internet and
back to the schools.
While in theory the system would work, the distance from the site to the shore station created
uncertainty. Most problematic was the quality of the microwave signal from a rocking boat,
especially when the sea state deteriorated. Funding was secured for the inaugural event, QAR
LiveDive 2000, and conducted in conjunction with archaeological recovery work in October 2000.
QAR LiveDive 2000
The initial goal of LiveDive 2000 was to broadcast live from QAR to the Internet while allowing
students to log on and question archaeologists as they worked on the ocean floor. To make this
QAR-B-02-01 Wilde-Ramsing/Eslinger
work, Bill Lovin and Rick Allen used two microwave transmitters and five antenna arrays. The high-powered
transmitter was placed on the boat and pushed the signal back to our shore facility at Duke
Marine Lab, and to the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort. On the rooftop of one of
Duke’s buildings, five antennas received the transmission and sent the signal down a cable to the
digitization studio where Bill Lovin compressed the signal for the web.
LiveDive 2000 began with little publicity and fanfare, but by the end of the week of webcasts
from the wreck site in October 2000, an estimated 1600 school children from across North America
had tuned in. Forty-nine school groups participated, including schools from North Carolina,
Washington State, New York, and Canada. These students logged on to the website every day to
watch the twice daily live broadcasts and ask the archaeologists questions in real-time as they worked
on the ocean floor. Included in the live question and answer periods was the North Carolina
Maritime Museum in Beaufort, the home of the project, and the North Carolina Museum of History
in Raleigh. In both locations the live segments were broadcast and used for public education over
the course of the five days.
The conclusion of LiveDive2000 demonstrated that the QAR Project had the necessary
components to make a webcast such as this happen technologically. The success was evident when
at the end of the event the large number of users logged onto the two servers caused both streaming
QAR-B-02-01 Wilde-Ramsing/Eslinger
sites to crash rather unexpectedly. This only raised the bar for the following year. In August of 2001
planning began for DiveLive 2001. This time the coordination of Bill Lovin, Rick Allen, and the
QAR Project resulted in better-planned sessions, better technological troubleshooting, richer content
and a far better webcast.
DiveLive 2001
October 1-5, 2001 the Queen Anne’s Revenge Shipwreck Project again went live from the wreck site
to the web. For two and a half days students and the public could log-on to watch and talk to
archaeologists as they worked on the site. For the last two and a half days the project staff took
students into the conservation laboratories to witness conservation and documentation processes.
After running LiveDive 2000, the QAR project staff and DiveLive staff felt they knew how to
improve on the previous year’s webcast. To accomplish this they set specific goals for 2001: first, to
broadcast live from the wreck site; second, to involve an even larger group of children and public
thus taking archaeology into a larger arena; and third, to broadcast from the conservation labs and
demonstrate the importance of slowly and thoroughly documenting every artifact and concretion.
With minimal publicity again this year the event drew an even larger audience, reaching sixteen states,
QAR-B-02-01 Wilde-Ramsing/Eslinger
two countries, eighty-seven schools, two museums, over thirty-six hundred school children and more
than twenty-seven hundred of the general public.
Although cameras and underwater housings have been around for decades, the transfer of a live
audio and video signal from a wreck site to a shore based station to the Internet is still a new
concept. In 2000 the project paired archaeological processes with the LiveDive event only to
discover that the webcasts interfered with the underwater work, as both archaeologists excavating
and archaeologists on camera required the communication units. To accommodate this problem in
2001, an archaeological plan, generated by Field Supervisor Michael Plakos was the foundation for
both broadcast times and the processes that could be shown on camera. In this way the archaeology
continued as the webcasts happened. As a result students watched and listened to the new
gradiometer survey, participated as a new baseline was laid, learned about artifact tagging, and site
examination. This year’s broadcast combined the excitement of underwater archaeology on the QAR
site with the scientific processes in the QAR labs. Students learned about archaeology, history,
chemistry, and geology while being able to ask questions and receive answers in real time. The
questions received during the five-day webcasts from students and teachers clearly demonstrated
both previous participation and the success of both this year and last year’s events.
QAR-B-02-01 Wilde-Ramsing/Eslinger
To handle the expected students for this year’s broadcast it was necessary to change some
aspects of the DiveLive production. This process began with meetings between Rick Allen, Bill
Lovin and DiveLive Coordinator Kim Eslinger. Together they planned out contingency broadcast
schedules, set tasks, determined technological parameters and laid out the event. To accomplish
DiveLive this year several constraints needed solving; the SGI needed to be eliminated, and more
streams were needed on the servers. This year rather than relying on the SGI workstation that
wreaked so much havoc the previous year; work was transferred to Power Mac G4’s even while
streaming to the Real Player server on NC DPI. Apple Computers donated streaming server space
for the project to allow us a continuous stream without concern over crashing servers. It was quite
clear in 2000 that there simply wasn’t enough server space to handle the amount of traffic that even
minimal publicity generated. NC DPI came through again with access to their server, but they could
only handle a small number of streams. In response to requests for greater server space David Kaye
at NC DPI approached Apple Computers to look into hosting the event on their ALI site. While
streaming live audio and video is difficult enough and bandwidth intensive, it was more difficult to
get Apple and DPI’s servers to talk to one another. To send the signal to Apple the signal was
obtained from the wreck site, sent back to the shore station, then sent via either T1 or T3 lines to
NCDPI, Apple Computer’s server then “split” the signal and broke through DPI’s firewall to pull a
stream to their server where it was made available to anyone that wanted to watch. With virtually
unlimited bandwidth at Apple’s server anyone could log on without our worries regarding server
crashes.
Unfortunately while the computer technology mostly worked there were some glitches primarily
associated with email communication between participating school groups and project engineers. A
virus in North Carolina took out most of the school servers resulting in major problems for all of
their Public Schools in accessing our site. Adding to the difficulties was the fact that the address set
up to handle the incoming questions failed and refused to recognize the emails. On the very first day
of the webcasts we received questions from students on the west coast three hours after the
broadcasts had ended, apparently yet another server issue. Several participants also complained
about the delay in the audio signals or that the signal was jumpy on their screens. These issues
appear to have solved themselves in every case, and there is still no answer as to why they happened
as they did.
Participation grew again this year at the end of the week as word circulated. One of the keys to
making an event such as this possible is the inclusion of proper publicity. Without advance public
relations and proper planning the event with either fail technologically or from lack of participation.
Because the point of an event such as this is to reach as large an audience as possible it is important
to notify schools and the public well in advance so that they can be computer savvy enough to
QAR-B-02-01 Wilde-Ramsing/Eslinger
participate. As school budgets across the country are continually cut, this too is a new and exciting
way to introduce school children to a world that they would be unable to see on traditional field trips.
In conclusion, this live Internet event was a resounding success for the QAR Project Staff, the
students and public involved.
While technological problems are expected, they can generally be resolved, and as technicians
continue to gain experience many can be anticipated and avoided. As confidence in the technology
grows and the ability to reach larger audiences becomes possible, organizers will seek to engage a
larger audience. Greater publicity and advanced notice can be accompanied with pre-project lesson
plans and activities, which in turn, will better prepare students for the DiveLive event and enrich that
experience. QAR DiveLive has proven that through technological advances, innovative and
dedicated personnel, and a relatively low budget an exciting, interactive experience in underwater
archaeology can be brought to tens of thousands of students and the interested public.